Wednesday, June 29, 2011

The Zanzibar swarmed with media people. Jimmy Mulville was often there. This sharp, witty, fast-brained Liverpudlian had been something of a legend in Cambridge, having left the year I arrived. He had gone up to read Latin and ancient Greek, and a less likely Cambridge classicist you could never hope to meet. The rumour was that his father, a docker from Walton, had come home one night when Jimmy was seventeen and said, 'You'd better do well in your A levels and that, son, because I've just been to the bookies and put down a bet on you getting all A grades and a scholarship to Cambridge. Got a good price too.'

'Christ, Dad!' Jimmy is reported to have said in shock. 'How much did you bet?'

'Everything,' came the reply. 'So get studying.'

They say that today's schoolchildren now suffer more exam pressure than my generation ever did, and generally I have no doubt that this is true, but I don't suppose many have had to endure pressure of the kind Jimmy did that year. He duly obliged with the straight As and the scholarship.

It is too good a story for me to check up and risk the disappointment of it being proved a distortion or exaggeration.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Sir, -- Mr Green's interesting article, The trouble with cockroaches (11 October), prompts the following story of an experience of a friend of mine some years ago. Returning late from the club one Saturday night he found everybody in bed, but his kitchen floor alive with cockroaches. Being of a tidy mind he sucked up as many as he could in a vacuum cleaner. Then the thought that they were not dead but merely snug in the cleaner prompted him to connect it by rubber tubing to a gas tap, and to fill the cleaner with gas. He retired happily to bed and slept late. Next morning his wife found the cleaner and thought she would clean up a little: she switched it on and it promptly blew up! The representative of the manufacturers was called in, and he confessed that he had "never seen one go like that before." My friend kept his silence and eventually got his replacement vacuum cleaner. I dare say any surviving cockroaches were highly amused.

June 23, 2011 (JUBA) – The urban population in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, panicked on Thursday after rumours that the river, which supplies the population in the city with water, had been poisoned by the North Sudan government just days ahead of the region’s independence. [...]

[...] Many cultures consider certain numbers to signify luck or disaster. In Afghanistan, 39 is taboo.

It's hard to find a credible story to explain what exactly it means, but everyone knows it's bad. Many Afghans say that the number 39 translates into morda-gow, which literally means "dead cow" but is also a well-known slang term for a procurer of prostitutes -- a pimp.

In Afghanistan, being called a pimp is offensive, and calling someone a pimp could carry deadly consequences. Similarly, being associated with the number 39 -- whether it's on a vehicle license plate, an apartment number or a post office box -- is considered a great shame. And some people will go to great lengths to avoid it. [...]

A CHINESE restaurant boss says his business is on the brink of bankruptcy after a vicious rumour claiming a dog’s microchip had been found wedged in a customer’s teeth swept the Five Towns.

Wai Wing Lee, manager of Eastern Court Cantonese Restaurant in Glass Houghton, claims hundreds of diners have been driven away by false reports that a dentist recovered a chip from between a diner’s teeth when he complained of toothache after eating at the Oriental buffet. [...]

Thursday, June 2, 2011

PORTAL, Ariz. - It is a dramatic tale: that illegal immigrants being pursued by the Border Patrol started one of the nation's largest wildfires, which has burned up more than 70,000 acres of national forest along Arizona's border with Mexico since it began almost four weeks ago. But the authorities say that despite the tale's being repeated often by some residents of the rugged countryside here, they do not know for sure if it is true. [...]